My newly created shop was not visible and returned the http 500 error.

While the CC guys were pretty good they did point me to my web server for support... who within minutes reported back with:

" .....In the index.php script, in this statement: require './ccdata/php/utilities.inc.php'; Try removing the period symbol or dot symbol before /ccdata

So I removed it, and all is now well. But how did this little dot get generated in the code ? is it a bug?

That is just part of the code generated by our software and has been there since the beginning. This is probably a unique situation with your hosting provider and they would have to fix this on the server side.

If you look at all the shops posted here in the forums, all of these people have a server that can process the line of code "require './ccdata/php/utilities.inc.php'" So it is definitely no a bug

Scott, Downloaded and installed the latest version and it uploaded and ran fine.